Latest news with #WorldWideFundForNature
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientist raises red flags about concerning phenomenon causing sharks to move closer to shore: 'New coastal environments'
Scientist raises red flags about concerning phenomenon causing sharks to move closer to shore: 'New coastal environments' Sharks and other cartilaginous fish are moving to shorelines in the Sea of Marmara as oxygen amounts fall in deeper waters, Türkiye Today reported. What's happening? Pollution and warmer waters have reduced oxygen in the sea's deeper sections. In parts below 200 meters in the eastern area, oxygen is now at zero, said Hakan Kabasakal, fish advisor at World Wide Fund for Nature-Türkiye. This change pushes sharks and similar fish toward shallow shore areas, where they encounter dangers. These fish need at least 4.5 milligrams of oxygen per liter of seawater to stay alive, but many areas of the Sea of Marmara now have less than 2 milligrams per liter. "Due to continued deoxygenation in deep waters, these fish can't return, but they also can't thrive in their new coastal environments because of overfishing," Kabasakal explained. Why is this marine oxygen drop concerning? When sharks swim to shore, it creates a problem for sea life and people who rely on healthy oceans. Out of 1,266 known cartilaginous fish, one-third could die out this century if nothing changes. These animals are top hunters in seafood chains, and when they vanish, whole food webs can fall apart. The issue is bigger than just sharks. Low oxygen creates "dead zones" where most marine animals can't survive. This harms fishing jobs and food sources for towns near the Sea of Marmara. In a three-year study, scientists observed an initial rise in shore shark numbers, but they then dropped rapidly in 2024. This shows that new areas can't keep these moved fish healthy over time. For humans, losing these sea animals means fewer natural hunters of pests and less mix of life in waters that coastal towns need for food and jobs. What's being done about this marine oxygen drop? Work is growing to help these at-risk fish and boost oxygen in sea waters. Do you worry about air pollution in your town? All the time Often Only sometimes Never Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. WWF-Türkiye built a wildlife tracking app called Gozum Dogada (My Eye on Nature) so people can report shark sightings along Türkiye's almost 9,000 kilometers of shore. "The more data we have, the stronger our conservation efforts become," Kabasakal noted. Scientists also combat misconceptions about sharks that instill fear instead of fostering care. He's looking at old shark attack records from the Mediterranean Sea to show they happen much less than people think. If you live by the sea, help by reporting unusual sea life sightings to local nature groups or by using a wildlife app. This gives important information to scientists tracking these changes. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet. Solve the daily Crossword
The Guardian
24-07-2025
- The Guardian
I travelled the globe to document how humans became addicted to faking the natural world. Here's what I found
The Anthropocene is a new term used by scientists to describe our age. While scientific experts argue about the start date, many point to about 200 years ago, when the accelerated effects of human activity on the ecosphere were turbocharged by the Industrial Revolution. Our planet is said to have crossed into a new epoch: from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, the age of the human. The strata of rock being created under our feet today will reveal the impact of human activity long after we are gone. Future geologists will find radioactive isotopes from nuclear-bomb tests, huge concentrations of plastics, the fallout from the burning of fossil fuels and vast deposits of cement used to build our cities. Meanwhile, a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature and the British Zoological Society shows an average decrease of 73% of wild animal populations on Earth over the past 50 years, as we push creatures and plants to extinction by removing their habitats. Humans have concentrated in cities. We have separated ourselves from the land we once roamed – and from other animals. But somewhere deep within, a desire for contact with nature remains. So, as we destroy the natural world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial experience of nature, a reassuring spectacle, an illusion. Over the past six years I have visited 14 countries across four continents, observing how we humans immerse ourselves in increasingly artificial landscapes. We holiday on synthetic beaches, attend zoos that display living animals in artistically rendered dioramas of their natural habitats, and visit amusement parks that offer a 'jungle experience'. We gaze at aquatic creatures in artificially lit sea-worlds, and at polar bears in Chinese shopping malls, pacing out their existence in glazed enclosures of plastic ice and snow. We ski on artificial slopes in Dubai, while outside the desert temperature is 48C. Tropical Islands holiday resort in Germany is a short train ride from Berlin. Housed in a vast hermetically sealed dome, the resort offers a sandy beach, a 10,000 sq metre indoor rainforest, a waterfall and a mangrove swamp with live turtles, dragonfish, flamingos and macaws. It's so large you can ride in a hot air balloon inside the dome, hovering above the crowds on the synthetic beach below. Walt Disney World in Florida covers more than 39 square miles (100 sq km), making it almost the same size as Paris. Completed in 1971, it is the largest and most visited theme park on the planet. In 2022, more than 47 million people visited Walt Disney World, where total revenue was $28.7bn. Nine million of those people visited Disney's Animal Kingdom. It was here that I visited Disney's version of Africa, where you can observe elephants, rhinos and fake villages (without leaving your electric mobility scooter with built-in cup holder). Experiences on offer include Kilimanjaro Safari and Gorilla Falls Exploration Trail, offering safe views of the world's largest primates, set to music. At the Tusker House restaurant you encounter Donald Duck in a colonial-era safari suit and pith helmet, before setting off on the Wild Africa Trek to see the rhinos. In the numerous theme parks and zoos I visited, I realised a strange thing: in these places, nothing happens. There are no surprises. There may be a wave machine, or a volcano that puffs smoke on the hour, or a rollercoaster offering momentary thrills. But nothing changes, good or bad. Everything repeats itself. Nothing happens unless it's part of the show. Here, nature is made safe – no thorns, biting insects, flooding or unpredictable creatures. This is nature only as spectacle. Even the surviving scraps of nature in the real world are becoming packaged for our consumption. Yosemite national park in California receives more than 4 million visitors a year, almost all of whom arrive by car. I found myself in a long traffic jam of SUVs crawling through the park, engines and air-conditioning running. Occasionally, a window glides open and an arm extends out to take a photo on a smartphone. Ski tourists are becoming more demanding, too. Everybody wants a winter wonderland, despite warming temperatures. According to the European Environment Agency, the length of snow seasons in the northern hemisphere has decreased by five days each decade since the 1970s. In Italy, 87% of ski slopes were kept operational with artificial snow in 2018, the first year I visited. Many ski resorts use artificial snow to extend their seasons, and some now rely almost entirely on artificial snow production. I saw whole hillsides covered with snow guns working through the night. A typical resort I visited in the Italian Dolomites had a five-megawatt power station to run its 250 snow guns. The owner told me: 'We make better snow than the natural stuff. In the past 20 years, the tourists have come to expect perfect-quality champagne snow.' Hotels in Asia offer live penguin encounters in restaurants, while South African lion farms offer tourists the chance to pet lion cubs and walk with tame adult lions. Later these same animals will be sold to visiting trophy hunters who want an effortless experience of hunting in 'the wild'. Even the great previously untamed places are under assault. Just 3% of the world's land now remains ecologically intact, with healthy populations of all its original animals and undisturbed habitat. Charles Darwin controversially recategorised man as just another species – one twig on the grand tree of life. But modern humans are no longer just another species. We are the first to reshape the Earth's ecosystem. We have become the masters of our planet and pivotal to the destiny of life on Earth. But it seems we are not prepared – ethically, emotionally or scientifically – for the enormous side-effects of our new and recklessly wielded power over our planet. In his 1989 book, The End of Nature, the writer Bill McKibben predicted a day when our changed environment would surpass the capacity of our environmental vocabulary. The remade Earth, he argued, would set record after record – hottest, coldest, driest – before people would be forced to seek new ways of describing and understanding events. For a long time, he suggested, confronted with evidence of a changing world, humans would simply refuse to change their minds. Social media and the internet's ceaseless flow of visual stimulation and information have birthed a state of unreality, where we are no longer looking for truth, but only a kind of amazement. Our future as a species depends on urgent new evaluations of humanity's relationship with the natural world. We have divorced ourselves from nature, yet we crave a connection with the very thing that we have turned our back on. In surrounding ourselves with simulated recreations of nature we create unwitting monuments to the very things that we have lost. It will take a paradigm shift in our priorities and empathies to change. But it is on an industrial and political level that change needs to happen. We already have a list of great ideas: protected natural habitats, rewilding, sustainable agricultural practices, ethical treatment of animals, renewable energy, and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and plastic pollution. We know what can be done. We just need to find leaders and captains of industry who want to do it. The Anthropocene Illusion, by Zed Nelson is published by Guest Editions
Yahoo
15-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Aussie woman's remarkable discovery inside tree hollow
In a world-first, an endangered greater glider has been discovered using its tail in a way no one thought was possible. The species has undergone a rapid decline over the last 20 years, and researchers are working against the clock to understand more about them. The footage of the male glider was captured after a camera with a live-feed was set up in his den. Previously, it had been thought these massive koala-sized animals had tails that were unable to grip, but the footage challenges this assumption. It shows the doting father named Milo using his tail to carry a bundle of eucalyptus stems inside his tree hollow for his child Brimi to eat. Related: 🔦 50-night search in Aussie forest uncovers worrying greater glider find The live stream was set up by Dr Ana Gracanin, an ecologist at the Australian National University. 'This unique behaviour had never been observed before, it's also some of the first evidence for paternal care in the species. Watching the joey take its first few nibbles was adorable, with little bite marks left as it tasted leaves, one by one,' she said. Speaking later with Yahoo News, Gracinin said the discovery had left her feeling 'ecstatic'. 'I've been watching the livestream from my work desk every single day, and they tend to do a lot of the same things — sleep, groom, stretch, groom. So when I was looking back at the activities and seeing Milo bring in leaves was really exciting,' she said. The project was supported by the World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia (WWF), National Parks Association NSW, Wilderness Australia, and Social Justice Advocates of the Sapphire Coast. And it's enabled people around the world to watch the complex social behaviour of glider family. 🚁 Calls to release documents behind helicopter shooting of koalas 🌳 Controversial $350,000 culling plan for 16 Aussie parks Secret hidden beneath Australia's 'most important' parcel of land Gracinin explained that very little is known about greater glider behaviour, particularly when it comes to how they parent. 'Greater gliders are often thought of as solitary, but we've seen Pip, Milo, and Brimi grooming, snuggling, and even engaging in what looks like play,' she said after the footage was discovered. WWF-Australia conservation scientist Dr Kita Ashman said the footage highlights why it's so important for glider habitat trees to be protected. The footage was taken at a secret location on the state's south coast, close to where the NSW state government-owned Forestry Corporation NSW is continuing to log forests known to be home to the endangered creatures. 'Greater glider trees are being logged by a government-owned hardwood business that has lost nearly $90 million in the last four and a half years. Losing that much money to degrade habitat and hurt our unique wildlife is shocking,' she said. 'The NSW government needs to transition out of native forest logging to save greater gliders and other threatened species.' Love Australia's weird and wonderful environment? 🐊🦘😳 Get our new newsletter showcasing the week's best stories.
Yahoo
29-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Delegates reach unprecedented agreement funding international efforts to protect wilderness: 'I come out of the meeting ... optimistic'
Global delegates have finalized an ambitious plan to raise at least $200 billion annually to protect nature. The agreement, led by negotiators from the BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — represents a crucial step toward preserving biodiversity and supporting environmental efforts worldwide. The deal is designed to fund efforts to halt and reverse the loss of wildlife and natural ecosystems. It builds on the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework established in 2022, which set out various environmental targets. Delegates also agreed on technical rules for monitoring progress toward these targets and committed to publishing national reports of their plans ahead of the 17th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. COP16 President Colombian Environment Minister Susana Muhamad hailed the agreement as a win for multilateralism and for nature. "From Cali to Rome, we have sent a light of hope that still the common good, the environment and the protection of life and the capacity to come together for something bigger than the national interest is possible," she said. Another key part of the agreement involves determining whether a new biodiversity fund is needed or an existing fund, such as the one run by the Global Environment Facility, is good enough. The need for action has never been clearer. Data from the World Wide Fund For Nature's 2024 Living Planet Report revealed that the average size of wildlife populations has dropped by 73% since 1970. With the agreement in place, negotiators have expressed optimism. Maria Angelica Ikeda of Brazil's Ministry of Foreign Affairs highlighted how compromise played a role in achieving a positive result, especially for developing nations. "Everyone with the spirit of compromise made concessions, and in general for developing countries the result was very positive," she said. "I come out of the meeting happy and optimistic," she added. While there are challenges ahead, with concerns about cuts to international aid from major funders, including the U.S., this agreement marks an important step in ensuring that vital biodiversity projects receive the financial support they need. With continued collaboration, this plan hopes to empower countries to protect nature, benefiting people and the environment for years to come. Which of these environmental causes would you be most interested in supporting with a financial donation? Promoting clean energy Protecting clean air Advancing forest conservation Fighting climate change Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
